[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is really just a tool that we're using to push our family's calling and vision into the world.
If you do this well, you stop it from being, hey, look at the spreadsheets. And can I talk to you, honey, about why I really think that the s and P500 is a better way for us to index American large cap stocks instead of the Dow Jones index. The goal here is to say, what happened? How did we deploy things? What opportunities exist for us to improve?
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Run your home and your dough like a biblical boss. I was talking with a friend today about how we are coaches of a team. We're not hosts of a club where your family comes in, we all wine and dine, we all kick back and have a great time.
That does happen in part. But we're part of a team that's going toward a goal. And if you're a team, you need to have a review to see how it's going.
So Mark's going to walk us through that today. Mark, before we do, how's it going in sunny, sunny Utah there? Is it lovely.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah. I think that it feels like there's birthday on the mind here.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah, We. I had a birthday since we last have been to.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: Congratulations.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Thanks.
I would say in the coming weeks you'll see new, new clothing on me. Oh, not. Not just because of the wonderful episode that we. We recently did on how men should approach dressing themselves.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: But also because I got some gifts. So birthday was good. Then we had a birthday for my daughter.
Today you're celebrating a birthday for your daughter too. So there's just birthdays happening all around.
[00:01:48] Speaker B: I would like to say that you wore a couple of threads when we were together in Oregon, and I thought, this is a good thread. And I fought myself for not saying it, but your threads were on point in Oregon. Well, it might have been that shirt or there's a shirt similar to it.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: I think I did bring this one with me. Yeah, I think that there was.
There was a combination of. I received a color consultation. I think I've talked about this on the podcast that my wife did. She loved it. They told her, here's the colors you should wear. And she started wearing them. Everybody complimented her.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Interesting. They.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: I did this and they were basically like, you need to dress like the Easter bunny. Those are your colors, pastels. And I kind of thought, I hate this. But sure enough, started wearing these colors and people are like, oh, that shirt looks good on you. So maybe I have to just switch over to being country club Mark and You know, wearing a pink polo to. To work. I don't know.
But where do you.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Where do you get a color analysis?
[00:02:53] Speaker A: Where.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: How does that happen?
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Created Colorful is the name of the company that will.
It's very.
It's. It's very unpleasant for a man, I would say, because they make you take a hundred selfies with different colors draped over you.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: And then they ask for 20 more. And I eventually responded. I said, what you have is all you're getting. So go ahead and make an analysis.
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Why can't I do this just wearing different clothes?
[00:03:23] Speaker A: I'm not sure that AI hasn't done it all already, but anyways, that was that.
I got to just quickly, quickly. Because occasionally we like to sprinkle in just a bit of some. Something frivolous.
You know, occasionally I drink the liquid death sparkling water.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: I do.
I don't know whether to let you introduce this or me because I can tell from the can what this is. And I've seen this product and had. And had very strong.
Asked aloud. Wanderings in my head. So please proceed.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: It's a new flavor that they're calling Fruity Pebbles flavored.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: Are you allowed to use the term? Fruity Pebbles doesn't have a little trademark.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: I think. I think that ever since Trump got reelected, it's allowed, but.
But it may be. It's only if your colors are a light summer.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: That might be the case.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Already used to wearing pastels but already being called fruity. I still don't know if I like it, but I can't stop drinking it because it tastes so weird. It tastes like Fruity Pebbles. So anyways, that's kind of a fun little.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: It's just interesting. It's just an interesting flavor.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: It's like. It's like the buttered popcorn. Jelly belly, Jelly bean.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:04:45] Speaker A: I don't like it.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Consider it again.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: But it sort of tastes like buttered popcorn. Anyways, in my nine to five life.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: It's the season of the year. I. Every time that we enter one of these seasons, I. I always ask myself, is this set up? Ideally, and I don't know if it is, but I actually get a lot of energy at this time of year because it's. It's about eight weeks in which with all the families that you and I work with, I take a chunk of couple months in the fall and do the same thing in the spring.
And I think there's things that everyone. I always say there are areas of your financial life, but just also of your life in general that need eyes put on them, critical eyes, and they need to be evaluated at least once every 12 months. Now that's not the bible. It's just that that particular rhythm, I think is a helpful one for us to go. If you're not at least looking at some things and saying what are the conditions of my flocks? At least once every year, I think you're probably dropping the ball. And so that's what I'm doing with, with our clients right now. My calendar doesn't have a lot of space in it.
I might be watching some golf this weekend, but there's not a lot of golf playing happening these days.
And so I thought it would be helpful to our crew because we've said it many times, not everyone needs a financial planner. Some people are just getting started and they can't afford a financial planner. There's just, but everyone can do an annual review of their, their financial condition.
And I just want to give a really quick outline. Sometimes, you know, on the podcast we'll go really deep and teach you. Here's how to do, here's how to use a health savings account to kind of secretly save for retirement and get a double tax benefit. And it's a highly technical thing. Today I'm going to give you more of a corporate quick overview that I think you'll come out of this episode going. I know now how to survey my financial condition and what I should be just keeping my ears perked for what, what kind of it looks like to exercise my responsibility as a, as a leader, whether that's me as a single person listening to this and I'm just in charge of my own finances or if I'm a grandfather with a gigantic multi generational family and all sorts of wealth.
I want you to just have some, some bullet points in your brain of how to do a quick survey of what's going on financially. And I think this is the right time of year to do it because, you know, we like to do vision summits either in December or January.
Those aren't great times to do this work though, because most things that can happen have happened by that point. So we strategically position this, this rhythm at this time of year because a lot has happened and yet there's still time to make changes. So I think it's a good time to talk about how to do a annual financial review.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: That's great.
I remember you writing about this years
[email protected] and, and quoting Proverbs 27, which says be diligent to know the condition of your flocks and pay attention to your herds.
So I just concur, Mark, that there are a lot of people that are like, we're trying to keep it under the budget, we're paying all our bills on time, we're trying to save a little bit, and maybe they don't take the time to actually review what's going on. So I think that's a great thing to do. Let me just ask, do you think that what you're about to describe is a joint project for husband and wife to do together, or is this just for dads, or do you think the dads should do it and present a report to the family? Or what are you thinking?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: I think that I'm not going to make laws about who has to be involved in what.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: What do you recommend?
[00:09:05] Speaker A: You don't even have to do all of this in one sitting or one day. I'm going to generalize. Often I run into families where the husband very interested in the numbers. Give me those numbers.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: What.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: What is our investment account return? Oh, why'd you only get this when we could have gotten this? Whatever.
And often the wife goes, I am not interested at all in the money. And one of the things I really love about doing this well alongside families is because if you do this well, you sort of take money out of its silo and put it into being. This is really just a tool that we're using to push our family's calling and vision into the world. You stop it from being, hey, look at the spreadsheets. And can I talk to you, honey, about why I really think that the s and P500 is a better way for us to index American large cap stocks instead of the Dow Jones index.
No, that's really not what we're talking about.
You can look at that stuff. I think that the value here and you can bring in more than just the wife. You can bring in the kids, you can even bring in the parents.
The goal here is to say what happened, how did we deploy things, what opportunities exist for us to improve? And I'm going to talk about what that means at the end.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: Okay, let's rock.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: Maybe the biggest change for me this year in kind of conducting financial reviews. I was listening to a podcast a couple months ago, Peter Attia. Do you know who that is, Steven?
[00:10:41] Speaker B: I do, and that's about it.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: He's a doctor who didn't practice medicine for a long time. He seems to be something of a genius who graduated med school. And then the financial crisis Happened. And he was super gifted at running investment schemes and helping consult through that crisis. And then he eventually came back to medicine, and now he kind of does a lot of content creation around longevity and healthy living and stuff like that. I find his podcast often insufferable because he has super interesting guests and never lets them talk. He just talks the whole time.
But episode 360, we'll put a link to that one in the show notes. He's talking to this MBA business guy who writes books on kind of the stuff I don't like to read about, which is like self help and productivity. But this guy used to be, I think, in the Marines.
And he talked, his books are all about habits and how do you create habits and how you reinforce habit change and all that. And he talked about when he was in Iraq as a Marine. He said, they train these undisciplined young guys.
If a bomb goes off and there's just dust everywhere and you don't know what to do, they're like, you know where to run. And there's only like one step. You go here when the dust cloud appears, and then the next thing you do is you turn to everyone that's close enough to you to hear it and you say, hey, you, good job. Good job. You went where you're supposed to go. Good job. And it was so important, that reinforcing mechanism, that we're on a team together.
We, we tell each other, good job.
They said, it's worth 20 corrections from a commanding officer. Like, you think in the Marines, some drill sergeant or a commanding officer on the battlefield comes up and chews you out. That would be about the most impactful thing that could happen.
And they did research and said, one good job from a peer is more likely to ingrain a good habit in you than 20 chewing outs from a commanding officer. And so I really, my wife and I have talked about that a lot since then, and she, she sees patients, tries to help them make changes in their physical health. You know, I talk to families and try to help them ingrain habits that are going to lead to financial flourishing.
But I think one of the biggest things we can do is really liberally apply our good jobs. And so the first thing I do when I'm doing an annual financial review is I go, what were the wins this year? And how can we say good job? And that doesn't just mean, you know, well, you got a raise, good job. Like, sure, that's cool. We can say that sometimes the good job needs to be. I mean, we didn't see these Marines running out to their place and saying, good job for saving everyone and stopping the bomb. You know, it was such a simple step. You ran to that one spot where your job on the team was to run there, and you did it. Good job, buddy. And I'm like, sometimes the good job is you left your accounts alone and just let them grow, and you stayed diversified throughout the year, and the result was positive. Good job.
That could be. We had a terrible year in the stock market, and you didn't freak out and bail and lose yourself a bunch of money.
It doesn't have to be like monumental shifts.
And I try to go through the list with families. It's. What did you spend money on this year? It's not. I think a lot of financial advisors is like, just spend way less. Oh, you cut your budget by 10%.
That that's possible. That that was a good job.
It could be that that was actually counterproductive. And you said you were going to do a big vacation as a family, and then you didn't do it because you got nervous about the stock market. Well, we would. If. If we have created a thoughtful plan together and you had plenty of money to do it, we would say that might have even been sin.
So sometimes the good job is you deployed your money in service of your family vision, building five capitals. You And I like to start all of these with the biggest set of atta boys that I can come up with. And because I'm a financial planner, I always tell people I probably know 3% of the actual wins that happened in your household. So I'm just going to call a few out. And I would encourage you to go home and, like, expand this list and just high five and encourage each other, because I think it's really important to getting us into the habit of positive financial moves.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Well, that's a good. That's a good affirmation for affirmation all the way around.
Look for anything that you can cheerlead in your home.
When. When you see obedience from your child, do it. When your wife has been thoughtful, say, thank you, honey. That means so much to me. And certainly when you see financial discipline, call it out and pull pom poms and kazoos and whatever to go. We're doing. Hey, this. We're headed in the right direction. That's a great tip for a coach. So I like it.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: So once you've done that, I don't want to cause eye rolls amongst our audience, but, oh, boy. We think family vision is still the Driver. Oh boy. I don't care if we're picking out index funds or choosing a place to go on vacation or figuring out what type of schooling we're going to do for our kids.
It starts with what is our unique calling and assignment when it comes to this family and our place in the kingdom? So I always revisit that. I say it could be as simple as, hey, I'm just going to put it up on the wall. Hey, guys, this is what we've said our family vision is. Does this still feel like us?
If the answer is no, we could go revisit that. A lot of times the answer is, yeah, that's it. And that can be a good sort of thing that we're going to hold everything else we go through up against. Well, we said that we are people who create environments where they can, others can experience the kingdom. Well, did we use, we used our money here, here, here, and we grew money in these ways and we started these things. Did those point to that or were they somewhere off in a totally different zone?
So I just say a quick review of family vision is a useful thing to do as you kind of ease into this financial review.
[00:17:14] Speaker B: Great.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: And then out of vision usually comes goals.
So if this is what we're here to do as a family, well, there's some things I'm going to try to be about right now. These are kind of my near term goals.
I'm working at a job and earning income. I'm saving some money so that I can retire someday because I know I won't be able to work at the same level I am today when I'm 95, etcetera, etcetera. There's some medium term stuff. Hey, we would really like to hand our kids a big gift when they get married or we would like to take that trip to Israel as a family. That seems real important to us. So we're saving.
And then there's long term stuff. We don't know exactly what this looks like, but we think this, that our family is supposed. I'm picking on you, Stephen. But yeah, we think we're supposed to have a big spread in Texas where it kind of becomes the hub for our great, great grandchildren to do recreational stuff.
And so we're going to just keep that as a pin out in the future.
I think those are useful and I promise they always will evolve. So I had not one, but three, three families in the last two days that had one of their goals. If you're hearing this, I'm not telling who you are. But one of their goals was we really want to buy one of those super fancy, like surfing boats. We really want a big old expensive boat. Those are not cheap.
Well, this year people looked at that and I'm not saying, hey, this is something you shouldn't have. I think those boats are a lot of fun.
But I've had families go, that's kind of fallen off our list. That's not really a goal anymore. And so it's worth just reviewing kind of your short, medium and long term goals and don't feel like you're stuck on them. Just cross them off the list if they don't, if they don't match anymore. Because that's going to really impact the.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Why.
[00:19:08] Speaker A: Why are we saving? Why are we investing? Well, if it's for a boat that we don't even want anymore, we're not going to be very motivated to do it.
So making sure those are actually lined up with our vision and just some of them are going to be our desires. We thought we were vacation home people and now we just don't. We've gotten really into something else. So quick review of goals.
[00:19:32] Speaker B: Sweet. I like it.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Now we get into my three legged stool that you don't really have to have a complex financial plan. If you can really dial in these three things, then you've got the basis for kind of what your financial world looks like.
They're real simple. What's coming in, what's our income look like. And that includes the money we make at a W2 job. It includes a business that we own that we get distributions from. Maybe we have a rental house and that's producing some income.
What's coming in, what's going out, what does it cost us to run our lives?
Some people, they're pretty good at, hey, I've got a job. I know I can look at my pay stub. I can tell you exactly how much comes in each year.
But you look at me like I've just kicked your dog. When I say, now, how much did you spend this year?
We don't know. How would we know that? I mean, we, we have some money left over, so we didn't spend all of it.
If that's you, we could probably link to 50 episodes where we've talked about the importance of budgeting and going back to knowing the condition of your flocks. I think in our world, some of us, I don't know if you are an Abraham's Walt listener and you have flocks, literal flocks, we'd love to Hear from you. Maybe we'll, we'll have an interview with a shepherd. That'd be exciting.
But most of us, our flocks are kind of our various assets and, and accounts and all that. And you really can't know the condition of how everything's running if you don't know how much it costs to maintain what you've got. If you, you know, it's the, it's the trap that so many high income people fall into is they look at their paycheck and they go, wow, look at all this money. I can afford to go buy something. And they don't think about, well, how much does it cost to just maintain all the stuff I've already bought?
You know, if I've got two homes, maybe adding another vacation property seems like it's affordable on paper, but I've never thought about how much I'm actually spending just to maintain these places and things like that. So what's going out is really important.
It's not just looking at the last four weeks of credit card statement and saying, what did I spend? Because some of those things that are going out are like, well, we took that vacation six months ago. That's not on my recent transactions. But, but in a year I'm spending on travel or, you know, again, we gotta, we gotta buy a roof. This, this roof is leaking. We better factor that into our ongoing costs.
And occasionally.
This isn't all like getting, sticking your hand out and getting smacked with the ruler. Sometimes you say we had intended to spend, like I said at the beginning, we had intended to spend things and we didn't. This year we've been so busy at work that we didn't do any of the family building stuff that we thought would be really good for us.
And in that case, I love this part of my financial planner job, which is when I get to tell people you should spend some more money doing the things you said were going to be meaningful as a family.
And that's again why some of the wins and the attaboys are important. Because when you do that, we're just kind of programmed. I mean, Stephen, you've talked about your wonderful German mother so often on this show, who frugality is a quality that got her through a lot of lean times in the world.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: True.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: But when it comes time to then spend, there can even be guilt. There can be guilt that like I, I did it, I loved it when it was happening, but now that it's over, I still wonder, should I have done that? And, and we want to pile on and say if it was what you intended to do and you could afford it, let's, let's be, be excited about it. So what comes in, what goes out, and the difference between those two is usually what's available to save.
So how much do I have and what am I doing with it? Is it sitting in my checking account? Like I just kept getting paychecks and I don't spend all of them. So my checking account had $500 on January 1st and now it has, you know, $25,000 in it. Well, that's not good. We, we aren't making any money. We're not sending those dollars out with jobs to do for our family if they're sitting there not doing anything for us.
If I said four years ago, I'm just really excited about cryptocurrency, I think that's the future.
But I think it would be Nice to have 10% of my wealth in that asset.
Well, if I put all my extra there and I kept doing that and I never revisited that, maybe it's time to say, oh, I need to shift gears with my savings. I need to diversify. Cast my bread upon the waters and spread it out a little bit more. Now I've gotten a little over concentrated here.
So how much is available to save? Where am I saving and am I optimizing that? That's kind of the third pillar. And if you get those three things right, frankly, you can invest in the wrong things. But if your income, your spending and your saving numbers jive with the plan and the vision you've got, you're probably going to be pretty okay in terms of managing your financial picture. Those are the critical three legs. And like I said, everything beyond that becomes, let's optimize, let's, let's expand based on these three things being correct.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Okay, let me just ask this one. I know there's not going to be an easy answer to this question, but I'm just thinking of what people might ask is a lot of people are very in tune with what's coming in, maybe pretty good, not as detailed in what's going out. And I certainly would underline again what you said, which is the most, the more specific. You can get down to categories and you can compare apples to apples. What did we spend on the children's health care last year and the year before that and this year? Can we see what's trending? That's very helpful.
But then when it comes to saving, I feel like most people, they're just kind of saving what they can, they're saving what's left over as a, as opposed to having a specific plan and, and building against that plan. Do you have anything to say to the person that's just like, I don't, I don't know. We're just trying to.
I'm thinking of a friend of mine. There's. They're moving into a house. It's going to be more house than they've ever had. They're not sure what is going to cost to kind of get the house up and running. They're not sure how much to spend on furniture.
There's. They're still feeling their way through what is my insurance going to cost every month?
How, how much of the paycheck. There's a new job. Also, how much of the new paycheck is actually going to make it into my bank account?
We're having babies.
Which, what do you say to that person that's going like, I don't have a defined savings plan, so how do I know if we're doing a good job?
[00:27:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's a great question.
My, my really quick flyby answer is that there is, there are levels of maturity in this area. Just like within anything in life.
Stage zero. Like you're just a brand new saver. Might be something as simple as, hey, I have never tried saving before, so I'm going to just build the muscle. You know, maybe it's as simple as I'm gonna get the match from my employer in a 401k account and that would be a good thing to do, start doing it. Maybe it's 5% of my paycheck goes into that. But soon thereafter we get to the need to say, I need to set a target based on some reality. And there is infinite retirement savings calculators. You can go dial up and I promise you, if all you've done is put a hundred bucks a month into an investment account or a savings account and thinking, well, I'm saving.
You're not getting anywhere near where you need to be just to support your basic needs in retirement, much less to achieve bigger goals and kind of intermediate stuff. So I think starting with one of those calculators can be an excellent first step.
And at some point things get more complex and you go, we have more money to steward.
So now we have permission to think about more than just can we pay for groceries when we're 75 years old?
That can be a good time to call in some help and say, well, we think we'd like to do Some pretty, pretty big generosity stuff that we had no business talking about when we were 25, but now that we're 40, could you help us answer that question? Now? You might be able to do that on your own, in which case you're going, I know how to do this, Mark and Steve, great, you already know the answer to that question. If you're completely clueless and you're just going, I have a lot of extra.
And I kind of know that if I don't make a plan, it vanishes.
That's the other side of what you just said is, let's see, what's left over is a guarantee that you'll be just aimless and not do anything responsible with your money.
But that's when I think it actually does make sense to either go find some specific tools or call somebody who can help you craft that plan. So that again, just, just saying we paid for our bills for the whole lives is kind of malpractice for somebody who's being entrusted with wealth. It's not what our king expects. He expects returns and those are not just financial, but they're not less than financial. So I do think that that's a good question that we should have some, some ideas of what do we need to put away in order to, to get to where we think we're going.
[00:29:57] Speaker B: Okay, so I hear look for ways to affirm and cheerlead. Up top, let's do a quick review of vision. Are there any goals that we set out for?
And then let's just do some 30,000 foot view. What's coming in, what's going out, what are we saving and do we, are we hitting our goals there? And if you don't have a goal, put a little effort to create a goal.
So, and then you say optimizing. Is there anything that you want to talk about, detailed regarding optimizing?
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah. As a part of that survey, I would always say, well, let's open the 401k account and once in a blue moon you're going to go, oh my gosh, it hasn't grown. My rate of return is 1% this year. Why? Well, it looks like I accidentally moved all of it into the money market account. But the stock market's grown by 15% this year. What was I doing? We just fixed that. Or, you know, I got on a harebrained idea to pick this one mutual fund that looked like, you know, I did the old bad idea of picking the fund that had made the most money the previous year.
But it's doing Terrible. This year, maybe I can spread that out into a more diversified portfolio this year.
You can do that for all of your accounts. Again, you can say, do I have the right amount of cash? Have I got three to six months of my expenses somewhere super safe? And if that a common problem we see is that has grown. I actually kept building up that cash and Now I've got 18 months worth of cash. Well, how can I deploy that to work for me, et cetera. Or maybe it's the opposite. Maybe it's, I've had this big investment account, it's done great. But we know that we want to purchase a rental home this year. So it's probably time to take some of that money out of a risky spot and move it into something a little more stable because we're going to be using it in the next year.
You can make all those adjustments at that time.
Okay.
Couple quick things and one less quick thing and then I'll close.
[00:32:01] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:32:02] Speaker A: Quick things. I think you can definitely check in on. This is just a subcategory of the what's going out. But I like to highlight it separately is generosity.
So what is your family doing when it comes to generosity?
Does it feel like it's inspiring joy and that can, the answer to that could be no. And, and it could be, well, that's a problem with our hearts. It could be no. And the problem is, well, we just don't really have a whole lot of excitement and this thing we're giving to doesn't match our, our calling in the world anymore. So we just need to change where we're doing that generosity. There's a whole lot of reasons there. But I, I do think we rarely just set a percentage or a dollar amount goal for giving. We almost always say a sign of health here is increasing over time.
So I like what you said about measuring generosity like other things, but measuring generosity against previous years.
And then I just like, this is an easy one. We always talk about how giving is a great way to pull your kids into money conversations.
Throw that out at the dinner table and go, here's where we're giving, guys. Does this still feel like us? Does it still feel like we are participating with the Lord in the things he's called our family to build with some of the money he's entrusted us with? I think that's a really important one to specifically zoom in on when you do your review.
[00:33:31] Speaker B: That's great.
I, I, I think it's sad to consider that there could be a kingdom family out there, a Christian family who when they consider the how do we overview our finances? They look at what they're earning, spending and saving and wouldn't stop to consider where is our generosity going.
And let me just beat this drum which I enjoy beating.
And that is God has put something so unique inside your home and he meant to do a specific thing when he designed your family, which is he wants to express part of his heart through who you are coupled with who your wife is and the things that beat on your heart deeply is what God wants to move forward on planet Earth. That's why you're here.
So you're giving.
You should give to people around you. Let's. You got a needy mother in law. Yes, give to her. You've got dear friends who are going through a financial crisis because they got health problems. Yes, give to them. You've got a dear friend who they're moving into their starter home. They don't have any furniture. I really feel moved to give them $5,000. Do that and give according to who God made you to be. If you're a disciple maker, give to disciple making ministries.
If you are an evangelist, find people who are sharing the gospel and say I'm, I want to vote for what you're doing. I want my money to be sent out in the world and giving a very strong thumbs up at things that we believe in. If you really believe in the, the rescue of the Christian family and the establishment of of Christian outposts, give to people who are doing that.
Make it happen. Have your money push the kingdom forward. That's what I think. It's great to have savings and sometimes we think that savings is only cash that's sitting right there that I could write a check for.
And you, you said this in so many words, Mark. But when you have inactive cash and it's and it's blossoming and ballooning past your emergency fund, it needs to go to work. You need to put it to work somewhere.
So invest in active cash is all I want to underline. So many people are paralyzed going is, is $3,000 enough to invest? It's probably not. Let's just let it sit there for another six months. Now it's $3,500. Yeah, I don't know. It's probably not. No, God is looking at the way you're managing your flocks and you go why aren't that, why aren't those dollars doing anything for me?
The Bible says that very clear that God asks that question of your dollars. Why isn't that money being Put to work. Oh, I don't know, I don't know what to do. Do something, put it to work. So buy and buy a simple index fund if that's scary to you to get into the market. Index funds not scary, but get it, get at least, I mean I always think of the Bible verse says you should have at least put it in the, in the bank and gotten some interest for it from the bank something. So I just want to repeat what Mark has already said. Invest in active cash.
[00:37:01] Speaker A: Great.
[00:37:01] Speaker B: Okay now, now I'm going to blast.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: Through two things and then I'm going to take us home and get your take on this one. But real easy one, once a year go to your insurance provider, which is I'm mostly thinking here about your home insurance, your auto insurance, all that stuff and just print out the statement of declarations on your policies and it'll say things like here's how much your home is insured for. Here's how much your possessions are insured for.
If your house burnt to the ground, this is what we would hand you to build a new house. Just make sure those are in step with reality. If you have owned your home for 10 years it's very possible that the costs are of replacement have exceeded what's on that policy.
So check in on that, make sure you have liability coverage. So if you need to get an umbrella insurance policy you can just tell your home and auto person, hey, I have a net worth of $1.5 million now so I probably need an umbrella policy to cover me if somebody sues me.
Just do that. It's really easy. Most people don't pay any attention to it and I was talking to a friend the other day who said he had a car accident and thankfully it was not a big one. But he realized if it could have been really bad and he realized when he got home his chuckle headed insurance agent had stopped paying their premiums and they had no insurance at that time. So at least once a year just peek in on your insurance and it does not take an expert to go do these numbers look right? And if they don't, just call your agent and say I have questions, am I covered correctly here? Um, so do that.
Uh, and then taxes. For most of you this is not nearly as complex as people think. You can just, it's, you know, we're, we're three quarters of the way through the year, give or take. Right now you can say I am at a job and I get paid a salary and you can look on your pay stub and see how much has been paid into federal taxes this year. And then you can go look at your tax return from last year and it'll say, here's what you paid in federal taxes last year. Here's how much you owed. Well, sometimes you look at that year to date number and you do a little math and go, by the time we get to December, I'm going to have paid way more than I owe, but nothing's really changed.
And then you can just go to your human resources team and say, can we withhold a little bit less in from my checks because it looks like I'm on the path to making a free loan to the government.
Conversely, you might go, we are cruising for a gigantuous tax bill because every. I'm still not going to hit what I owe. And I forgot, but I sold this asset and I made an extra $40,000. So I'm doing something else this year. And so I need to start preparing for that and make sure that I'm not left high and dry when tax reporting time comes.
There's other situations where you would go, I don't have a super straightforward tax situation. Stephen, just using you as an example, we were talking about a business your family owns today, and I just looked at some of the numbers and I said, hey, you know, you guys could have saved some money with this little trick that is not commonly known. And so if you're in a more complex tax situation, you've got a business or multiple businesses and some mother. That's when it often makes sense to pull in an expert and do some real preemptive tax planning. And this is the time to do that. I'm not telling you you have to become an expert. Tax laws change every year, which is why we do tax review every year.
Because it's not just something we put on autopilot. It's usually something where we go, even if nothing's changed with you, things have changed in the laws and the rates and all that. So it's worth just doing a review, particularly as your situation gets more and more complex.
Okay, so all of this wraps up to say, if you've gone through those things once a year, you've done a pretty good job. Good job, guys. High five. You went to your spot. You've done a pretty good job of a financial review for the year.
And you can get. We could do two hours on every single little point that we covered.
And my hunch is we have done that. If you go back and you go, well, insurance, I'm Interested in learning more? Just go to abrahamswall.com and there's a search box at the top. You can type in insurance, and it'll pull up lots of episodes and articles we've done on insurance or whatever you want to learn about. But I think the goal of this. And Steven, you kind of mentioned this when you said, I want to compare against what happened last year and things like that. I really think the best question we can ask to wrap it up is, is our capacity financially and otherwise? Is our capacity expanding or contracting?
We're at our church. We're going through Proverbs 31 right now and studying kind of that. And I think some people hear Proverbs 31, Woman, and they go, I'm just running myself ragged trying to take care of five little kids. And, you know, my husband's working his butt off at the. At the. Well, I don't know, assembly line. What's the.
[00:42:23] Speaker B: At the bakery. At the bakery.
[00:42:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:42:27] Speaker A: And so we're maxed out on capacity, and there are seasons where capacity feels really limited.
But if you could just say, when I zoom out and look at the highest level, is our capacity as a family expanding or contracting? Okay, the next question is why? And so if you go, well, we have more capacity than we did last year, then you have to ask why.
There's two possibilities. One is we've been basically sitting on our butts and we need to get to work.
We haven't done anything. You know, we got used to just the years when our kids were tiny and we felt maxed out all the time, and then they became teenagers, but we didn't really change anything, and now we're just not that busy. Yeah, that's not a good expansion of capacity. That's just you not using what you've already got. That's like the person who leaves a bunch of cash in their checking account.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: It could be doing a lot more.
But the other option, and this is kind of where I am assuming a lot of our Abrahamic families are, is they go, we're maturing, you know, And I was talking to a buddy this week, and he's. He builds things. He builds homes and commercial properties and things like that. And I said, when you first started your business, if somebody had come to you and said, I would like you to do five new home constructions starting right now, you would have completely been. It would have been impossible.
[00:43:57] Speaker B: Right.
[00:43:57] Speaker A: And yet today, if you. If somebody said that to you, you go, okay, we can. We can manage that project.
[00:44:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:44:02] Speaker A: It's not because you would just work five times as much now and you've gotten used to it. It's because your capacity has expanded and you know how to organize more and run a bigger team and all of that because you've gotten more mature as a business. And I think this is true of our families. I think we're going to do a whole little episode on this in the future. But I think if. If you say actually our capacity has shrunk, then the question is, well, how do we get back on track? And it could be that you have more money, but way less. Your household is chaotic now, and it didn't feel that way last year. Well, maybe it's time to trade some of that money to improve circumstances for the soldiers on the ground in the household. We talk about that all the time.
Maybe we maxed out what we could do with the level of education that we have, and so our income can't grow anymore. And so what we found is we're feeling maxed out, but it's been because the only way for us to earn more now is to work more hours.
And what would help is if let's go get some more education so that we could expand our earning potential and not just work more hours if we need to earn more dollars.
There's a lot of answers to that question, but I think it's one of the best kind of summary questions to ask as you survey your family's financial year is has our capacity financially and otherwise expand, Expanded or has it shrunk? And either way, why? Why. What could we identify that would say, this is why we feel more or less like there's space for additional things.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: I like it. It's great. I love that question. Is our capacity expanding? Because what it does is it sets you up to start thinking of where are we going next? So which is the point of entire review? If you didn't. If you didn't. If we're all going to die next Tuesday, we don't do a review of your finances. The point is what's happening right now and how are we postured for what is to come. So I'd like to just couple the first thing that you said with the last thing, which was to review your family's mission and to see are we expanding, are we contracting in our ability to do things? If you're expanding, I'm thinking, forgive me, I'm thinking of myself, that when I have a high schooler who's driving, that's going to expand the capacity of me and my wife. So we're going to have like, we're both going to have like part time jobs that we're finished with and our ability to do things is going to increase.
So we have to start thinking through what's next for us. Where are we going as you say? It's not that I'm going to go go buy a video game console and see if I can get good at discovering new worlds and you know, I don't know what it is what they. I don't know what those kids do in video games.
It, it is. Where are we headed as a family and how could we capitalize this moment in what God's doing in our family? So as you look at Q3 I just want to encourage everybody right now. I'm sorry we're coming out of Q3 as you're looking at Q4 before I encourage you to protect some time Even if you could find half a day dad to go I'm going to spend four hours and maybe it's going to be on a Sunday. There's a workdays around my house. I'm going to protect some time that I personally can do a review of our year so that when it comes time for the goals summit I'm ready to present something. I have a sense of where we are and what our trajectory we should be going forward as a coach. This is the job we are for you. I hope you hear that loud and clear. Mark and I are for you. We want to help you in any way we can because we want to equip and inspire godly kingdom leaders like you. So until next time, run your home and your dough like a biblical boss.
